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8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

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8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Just about any business has a social media presence. Regardless of which platform, it’s almost impossible to grow a brand’s online presence without a social media presence.

So it should come as no surprise that B2B brands also need an effective social media strategy to foster growth and customer interaction.

And social listening can help you aid in both the growth and daily operation of your business. Social media listening also enables you to avoid making a reputation for all the wrong reasons.

But there’s a lot more to social media listening than replying to every Twitter reply or liking every Instagram comment you get.

Social media listening can turn Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whichever is your poison into a significant touchpoint for your brand when done right.

But you need to keep an ear (or eye) out for the right things.

In this article, you’ll see:

  • The difference between social media monitoring and listening
  • What you should listen for on social media
  • How these things help your brand

Let’s dive in.

Social Media Monitoring vs Social Media Listening

There’s a fine line between social media listening and monitoring. While they do, at times, overlap, it’s essential to have a separate strategy for both.

Monitoring sees the football players, whereas listening sees the match.

Social media monitoring is taking time every day to listen to what’s being talked about online. Internet pop culture involving brands, trends, people, as well as politics, too. These things combine to create the online world that your product exists in. It’s critical that you consider these things when marketing your brand and supporting your customers.

On the other hand, social media listening is the process of finding and analyzing real discussion about your brand, product, or a problem that your product solves. Effective social media listening helps build brand awareness and foster a positive reputation for those that can benefit from your brand’s presence.

As a socially conscious brand, Ben & Jerrys used the BLM movement to affirm their stance and show that they’re responsible for helping change social norms.

1641971468 866 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

This is a fine example of a brand’s proactive approach to social media monitoring.

Below is a fine example of American Burger chain, Wendy’s, using social media listening to interact with both positive and negative feedback:

1641971468 721 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Let’s dive in and see how you can use social media listening for your brand:

#1 – Find Honest Feedback

Remember when, as a kid, your mum put your stick-figure drawings on the fridge because it was ‘so beautiful’? That’s not really the feedback that’s going to help improve your artistic skills. You needed your mum to say ‘that’s cute honey, but daddy doesn’t have green hair.’

1641971468 559 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Honest feedback is critical. Not just for your childhood art skills, but your developing brand. And social media listening is key to finding that honest, unabashed feedback.

Reddit, Quora, and niche forums are made up of active users that regularly share their thoughts on a product or service.

Below, you can see a Quora post asking if the SEO tool, Ahrefs, is effective.

1641971469 773 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Suppose your product is spoken about on one of these channels. In this case, it can be a gold mine of improvement for your brand, as well as an opportunity to interact.

#2 – Effective Customer Support

Social listening can help turn your social media channels into a proactive form of customer support.

Many customers see social media as a support channel (along with phone and email). Because of this, you must use social media to monitor requests for help, and either take the support request to another channel or lend assistance on the social media channel itself.

Several months ago, I personally used Twitter to get help from Grammarly, a writing tool that I use:

1641971469 275 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Within a few hours, the team had got back to me with the best way to get the help that I needed.

1641971469 489 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

This simple response was an acknowledgement of my problem, and they pointed me in the right direction to get help.

Having standardized responses to feedback and complaints is good, but remember that a canned response isn’t always the best.

A prime example is EA’s post on Reddit about a disgruntled customer and micro-transactions. The result was the most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit.

1641971469 942 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

#3 – Monitor The Industry

Social listening helps you keep on track of ‘hype’ before it becomes a trend. Staying on top of popular hashtags, specific profiles, and other influential personalities, you’re able to get an idea of the environment your brand will operate in tomorrow.

Having such foresight, and working with your marketing team and their plans can help you adapt a product’s position, target audience, or even USPs.

This is akin to social media monitoring, however, it’s also an excellent opportunity to take cues from a more comprehensive environment and assess how they relate to your brand. For example, is your product always being mentioned by eco-activists or environmentally conscious consumers? Perhaps teens that are head over heels about TikTok.

In monitoring the industry and environment that your product is a part of, you’re blending social media monitoring with listening.  

#4 – Improve Your Reputation

Below, you can see how a disgruntled user of Moonpig took his frustration to Twitter.

1641971469 902 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Most of what happens (including the above Tweet) on the internet is there for anyone and everyone to see. Moonpig has an option here – they can reach out and try and fix the problem, not contact Jonathan but try and fix the problem, or do neither. Any of those options will undoubtedly have an effect on their reputation.

So your brand’s proactive approach to listening and interacting with fans and customers on social media helps improve and manage your reputation. And it’s a positive reputation that’ll help more people trust your brand.

But part of building (and maintaining) that positive reputation is also knowing when not to engage and talk. Not all mentions of your brand have to have your interaction proceeding them.

Different communities, people, and groups may talk about you in different ways. But what’s important is that you know that they’re not always talking to you. Therefore, knowing when not to talk is just as important as knowing when to talk.

#5 – Finding (And Managing) Advocates

Customers that like your brand are critical to effectively spreading your brand’s name amongst their social circles. But it’s brand advocates that can truly thrust your brand into new markets. Brand advocates elevate your brand using word of mouth marketing. WOM marketing is known to be some of the most effective marketing, as a personal recommendation (that’s not paid for) builds a lot of trust.

Social media listening can help you identify brand advocates or those who may very well become advocates.

Below is a great example of finding a brand advocate:

1641971469 211 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Redken clearly has an advocate in Harry. They can pursue him to create an unboxing video, attack him with freebies like custom tote bags and other branded goodies, encouraging him to create more content for the brand. In turn, he’ll be showing off the brand’s packaging materials and unboxing experience, and they’ll use him as a traditional influencer.

Alternatively, they can engage with him, thank him and let him keep spreading the Redken name organically.

Interacting and managing brand advocates is vital to keep them effective and show onlookers how you treat those who are loyal to your brand.

#6 – Monitor Brand Growth

It’s questionable whether the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad PR‘ still rings true in this day and age. What is true, though, that lousy PR will have an effect on your image, reputation, as well as your growth – but the same is true for good PR, too.

Below is an example of a controversial tweet from KFC Australia. While it caused a lot of negative press, it also helped spread their new product much farther than if they didn’t have the bad PR:

1641971469 399 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

Whether it’s good or bad coverage, social media listening helps you monitor the public’s reaction to any press, controversies or ‘questionable situations’ that your brand may find itself a part of.

Combined with the right marketing attribution software, you’ll be able to assess the relationship between negative comments and sales, traffic, conversions, or some other business metric. From here, you can then get an idea of just how much of an impact (either positive or negative) such a situation had on your social media data and your business.

#7 – Stay On Top Of Competitors

Knowing who is talking about your brand, and in what context, can help you move ahead of your competitors.

As well as keeping track of your mentions, it’s essential to track your closest competitors.

  • How are brands interacting with them?
  • What are they doing that you’re not?
  • What’s the sentiment toward other competitors?
  • What’s the difference between those talking about your competitors and those talking about your brand?

Answering these questions can help set you apart from your competitors, as well as take advantage of them.

Formal menswear company, SockSoho, recently tweeted an unboxing video made by one of their customers.
1641971469 283 8 Things Social Media Listening Can Do For Your Brand

SockSoho’s competitors can see this content, and not only get an idea of how much their customers love them, but also see the postal boxes being used, and the quality of the product. Some very advantageous insights.

#8 – Find Pain Points & Product Improvements

If people aren’t 100% satisfied with your product, they’ll more than likely take to social media to vent their frustrations.

This may be an attempt to ‘publicly shame’ a brand; it may be to get fast support in the public eye.

Either way, the information you receive via social listening can be valuable to improve a product and minimize pain points.

There’s a fine line between criticism and constructive criticism. But as social listening makes you privy to both, you’re able to filter what’s productive from what’s not. This constructive criticism can be passed on to relevant departments to develop further improvements.

Conclusion

For brands of all shapes and sizes, social media listening is the first step in making social media work for them. If you want to make social media listening effective, it’s essential to have a plan.

Your tone of voice, which conversations you address, and in what way you address them, all these things help make your social media listening effective. Any social media channel that your brand has a presence on can become a marketing channel and customer support and sales channel in time.


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OpenAI’s Drama Should Teach Marketers These 2 Lessons

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OpenAI’s Drama Should Teach Marketers These 2 Lessons

A week or so ago, the extraordinary drama happening at OpenAI filled news feeds.

No need to get into all the saga’s details, as every publication seems to have covered it. We’re just waiting for someone to put together a video montage scored to the Game of Thrones music.

But as Sam Altman takes back the reigns of the company he helped to found, the existing board begins to disintegrate before your very eyes, and everyone agrees something spooked everybody, a question arises: Should you care?

Does OpenAI’s drama have any demonstrable implications for marketers integrating generative AI into their marketing strategies?

Watch CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose explain (and give a shoutout to Sutton’s pants rage on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), or keep reading his thoughts:

For those who spent last week figuring out what to put on your holiday table and missed every AI headline, here’s a brief version of what happened. OpenAI – the huge startup and creator of ChatGPT – went through dramatic events. Its board fired the mercurial CEO Sam Altman. Then, the 38-year-old entrepreneur accepted a job at Microsoft but returned to OpenAI a day later.

We won’t give a hot take on what it means for the startup world, board governance, or the tension between AI safety and Silicon Valley capitalism. Rather, we see some interesting things for marketers to put into perspective about how AI should fit into your overall content and marketing plans in the new year.

Robert highlights two takeaways from the OpenAI debacle – a drama that has yet to reach its final chapter: 1. The right structure and governance matters, and 2. Big platforms don’t become antifragile just because they’re big.

Let’s have Robert explain.

The right structure and governance matters

OpenAI’s structure may be key to the drama. OpenAI has a bizarre corporate governance framework. The board of directors controls a nonprofit called OpenAI. That nonprofit created a capped for-profit subsidiary – OpenAI GP LLC. The majority owner of that for-profit is OpenAI Global LLC, another for-profit company. The nonprofit works for the benefit of the world with a for-profit arm.

That seems like an earnest approach, given AI tech’s big and disruptive power. But it provides so many weird governance issues, including that the nonprofit board, which controls everything, has no duty to maximize profit. What could go wrong?

That’s why marketers should know more about the organizations behind the generative AI tools they use or are considering.

First, know your providers of generative AI software and services are all exploring the topics of governance and safety. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and others won’t have their internal debates erupt in public fireworks. Still, governance and management of safety over profits remains a big topic for them. You should be aware of how they approach those topics as you license solutions from them.

Second, recognize the productive use of generative AI is a content strategy and governance challenge, not a technology challenge. If you don’t solve the governance and cross-functional uses of the generative AI platforms you buy, you will run into big problems with its cross-functional, cross-siloed use. 

Big platforms do not become antifragile just because they’re big

Nicholas Taleb wrote a wonderful book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. It explores how an antifragile structure doesn’t just withstand a shock; it actually improves because of a disruption or shock. It doesn’t just survive a big disruptive event; it gets stronger because of it.

It’s hard to imagine a company the size and scale of OpenAI could self-correct or even disappear tomorrow. But it can and does happen. And unfortunately, too many businesses build their strategies on that rented land.

In OpenAI’s recent case, the for-profit software won the day. But make no bones about that victory; the event wasn’t good for the company. If it bounces back, it won’t be stronger because of the debacle.

With that win on the for-profit side, hundreds, if not thousands, of generative AI startups breathed an audible sigh of relief. But a few moments later, they screamed “pivot” (in their best imitation of Ross from Friends instructing Chandler and Rachel to move a couch.)

They now realize the fragility of their software because it relies on OpenAI’s existence or willingness to provide the software. Imagine what could have happened if the OpenAI board had won their fight and, in the name of safety, simply killed any paid access to the API or the ability to build business models on top of it.

The last two weeks have done nothing to clear the already muddy waters encountered by companies and their plans to integrate generative AI solutions. Going forward, though, think about the issues when acquiring new generative AI software. Ask about how the vendor’s infrastructure is housed and identify the risks involved. And, if OpenAI expands its enterprise capabilities, consider the implications. What extra features will the off-the-shelf solutions provide? Do you need them? Will OpenAI become the Microsoft Office of your AI infrastructure?

Why you should care

With the voluminous media coverage of Open AI’s drama, you likely will see pushback on generative AI. In my social feeds, many marketers say they’re tired of the corporate soap opera that is irrelevant to their work.

They are half right. What Sam said and how Ilya responded, heart emojis, and how much the Twitch guy got for three days of work are fodder for the Netflix series sure to emerge. (Robert’s money is on Michael Cera starring.)

They’re wrong about its relevance to marketing. They must be experiencing attentional bias – paying more attention to some elements of the big event and ignoring others. OpenAI’s struggle is entertaining, no doubt. You’re glued to the drama. But understanding what happened with the events directly relates to your ability to manage similar ones successfully. That’s the part you need to get right.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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The Complete Guide to Becoming an Authentic Thought Leader

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The Complete Guide to Becoming an Authentic Thought Leader

Introduce your processes: If you’ve streamlined a particular process, share it. It could be the solution someone else is looking for.

Jump on trends and news: If there’s a hot topic or emerging trend, offer your unique perspective.

Share industry insights: Attended a webinar or podcast that offered valuable insights. Summarize the key takeaways and how they can be applied.

Share your successes: Write about strategies that have worked exceptionally well for you. Your audience will appreciate the proven advice. For example, I shared the process I used to help a former client rank for a keyword with over 2.2 million monthly searches.

Question outdated strategies: If you see a strategy that’s losing steam, suggest alternatives based on your experience and data.

5. Establish communication channels (How)

Once you know who your audience is and what they want to hear, the next step is figuring out how to reach them. Here’s how:

Choose the right platforms: You don’t need to have a presence on every social media platform. Pick two platforms where your audience hangs out and create content for that platform. For example, I’m active on LinkedIn and X because my target audience (SEOs, B2B SaaS, and marketers) is active on these platforms.

Repurpose content: Don’t limit yourself to just one type of content. Consider repurposing your content on Quora, Reddit, or even in webinars and podcasts. This increases your reach and reinforces your message.

Follow Your audience: Go where your audience goes. If they’re active on X, that’s where you should be posting. If they frequent industry webinars, consider becoming a guest on these webinars.

Daily vs. In-depth content: Balance is key. Use social media for daily tips and insights, and reserve your blog for more comprehensive guides and articles.

Network with influencers: Your audience is likely following other experts in the field. Engaging with these influencers puts your content in front of a like-minded audience. I try to spend 30 minutes to an hour daily engaging with content on X and LinkedIn. This is the best way to build a relationship so you’re not a complete stranger when you DM privately.

6. Think of thought leadership as part of your content marketing efforts

As with other content efforts, thought leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It thrives when woven into a cohesive content marketing strategy. By aligning individual authority with your brand, you amplify the credibility of both.

Think of it as top-of-the-funnel content to:

  • Build awareness about your brand

  • Highlight the problems you solve

  • Demonstrate expertise by platforming experts within the company who deliver solutions

Consider the user journey. An individual enters at the top through a social media post, podcast, or blog post. Intrigued, they want to learn more about you and either search your name on Google or social media. If they like what they see, they might visit your website, and if the information fits their needs, they move from passive readers to active prospects in your sales pipeline.

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How to Increase Survey Completion Rate With 5 Top Tips

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How to Increase Survey Completion Rate With 5 Top Tips

Collecting high-quality data is crucial to making strategic observations about your customers. Researchers have to consider the best ways to design their surveys and then how to increase survey completion, because it makes the data more reliable.

→ Free Download: 5 Customer Survey Templates [Access Now]

I’m going to explain how survey completion plays into the reliability of data. Then, we’ll get into how to calculate your survey completion rate versus the number of questions you ask. Finally, I’ll offer some tips to help you increase survey completion rates.

My goal is to make your data-driven decisions more accurate and effective. And just for fun, I’ll use cats in the examples because mine won’t stop walking across my keyboard.

Why Measure Survey Completion

Let’s set the scene: We’re inside a laboratory with a group of cat researchers. They’re wearing little white coats and goggles — and they desperately want to know what other cats think of various fish.

They’ve written up a 10-question survey and invited 100 cats from all socioeconomic rungs — rough and hungry alley cats all the way up to the ones that thrice daily enjoy their Fancy Feast from a crystal dish.

Now, survey completion rates are measured with two metrics: response rate and completion rate. Combining those metrics determines what percentage, out of all 100 cats, finished the entire survey. If all 100 give their full report on how delicious fish is, you’d achieve 100% survey completion and know that your information is as accurate as possible.

But the truth is, nobody achieves 100% survey completion, not even golden retrievers.

With this in mind, here’s how it plays out:

  • Let’s say 10 cats never show up for the survey because they were sleeping.
  • Of the 90 cats that started the survey, only 25 got through a few questions. Then, they wandered off to knock over drinks.
  • Thus, 90 cats gave some level of response, and 65 completed the survey (90 – 25 = 65).
  • Unfortunately, those 25 cats who only partially completed the survey had important opinions — they like salmon way more than any other fish.

The cat researchers achieved 72% survey completion (65 divided by 90), but their survey will not reflect the 25% of cats — a full quarter! — that vastly prefer salmon. (The other 65 cats had no statistically significant preference, by the way. They just wanted to eat whatever fish they saw.)

Now, the Kitty Committee reviews the research and decides, well, if they like any old fish they see, then offer the least expensive ones so they get the highest profit margin.

CatCorp, their competitors, ran the same survey; however, they offered all 100 participants their own glass of water to knock over — with a fish inside, even!

Only 10 of their 100 cats started, but did not finish the survey. And the same 10 lazy cats from the other survey didn’t show up to this one, either.

So, there were 90 respondents and 80 completed surveys. CatCorp achieved an 88% completion rate (80 divided by 90), which recorded that most cats don’t care, but some really want salmon. CatCorp made salmon available and enjoyed higher profits than the Kitty Committee.

So you see, the higher your survey completion rates, the more reliable your data is. From there, you can make solid, data-driven decisions that are more accurate and effective. That’s the goal.

We measure the completion rates to be able to say, “Here’s how sure we can feel that this information is accurate.”

And if there’s a Maine Coon tycoon looking to invest, will they be more likely to do business with a cat food company whose decision-making metrics are 72% accurate or 88%? I suppose it could depend on who’s serving salmon.

While math was not my strongest subject in school, I had the great opportunity to take several college-level research and statistics classes, and the software we used did the math for us. That’s why I used 100 cats — to keep the math easy so we could focus on the importance of building reliable data.

Now, we’re going to talk equations and use more realistic numbers. Here’s the formula:

Completion rate equals the # of completed surveys divided by the # of survey respondents.

So, we need to take the number of completed surveys and divide that by the number of people who responded to at least one of your survey questions. Even just one question answered qualifies them as a respondent (versus nonrespondent, i.e., the 10 lazy cats who never show up).

Now, you’re running an email survey for, let’s say, Patton Avenue Pet Company. We’ll guess that the email list has 5,000 unique addresses to contact. You send out your survey to all of them.

Your analytics data reports that 3,000 people responded to one or more of your survey questions. Then, 1,200 of those respondents actually completed the entire survey.

3,000/5000 = 0.6 = 60% — that’s your pool of survey respondents who answered at least one question. That sounds pretty good! But some of them didn’t finish the survey. You need to know the percentage of people who completed the entire survey. So here we go:

Completion rate equals the # of completed surveys divided by the # of survey respondents.

Completion rate = (1,200/3,000) = 0.40 = 40%

Voila, 40% of your respondents did the entire survey.

Response Rate vs. Completion Rate

Okay, so we know why the completion rate matters and how we find the right number. But did you also hear the term response rate? They are completely different figures based on separate equations, and I’ll show them side by side to highlight the differences.

  • Completion Rate = # of Completed Surveys divided by # of Respondents
  • Response Rate = # of Respondents divided by Total # of surveys sent out

Here are examples using the same numbers from above:

Completion Rate = (1200/3,000) = 0.40 = 40%

Response Rate = (3,000/5000) = 0.60 = 60%

So, they are different figures that describe different things:

  • Completion rate: The percentage of your respondents that completed the entire survey. As a result, it indicates how sure we are that the information we have is accurate.
  • Response rate: The percentage of people who responded in any way to our survey questions.

The follow-up question is: How can we make this number as high as possible in order to be closer to a truer and more complete data set from the population we surveyed?

There’s more to learn about response rates and how to bump them up as high as you can, but we’re going to keep trucking with completion rates!

What’s a good survey completion rate?

That is a heavily loaded question. People in our industry have to say, “It depends,” far more than anybody wants to hear it, but it depends. Sorry about that.

There are lots of factors at play, such as what kind of survey you’re doing, what industry you’re doing it in, if it’s an internal or external survey, the population or sample size, the confidence level you’d like to hit, the margin of error you’re willing to accept, etc.

But you can’t really get a high completion rate unless you increase response rates first.

So instead of focusing on what’s a good completion rate, I think it’s more important to understand what makes a good response rate. Aim high enough, and survey completions should follow.

I checked in with the Qualtrics community and found this discussion about survey response rates:

“Just wondering what are the average response rates we see for online B2B CX surveys? […]

Current response rates: 6%–8%… We are looking at boosting the response rates but would first like to understand what is the average.”

The best answer came from a government service provider that works with businesses. The poster notes that their service is free to use, so they get very high response rates.

“I would say around 30–40% response rates to transactional surveys,” they write. “Our annual pulse survey usually sits closer to 12%. I think the type of survey and how long it has been since you rendered services is a huge factor.”

Since this conversation, “Delighted” (the Qualtrics blog) reported some fresher data:

survey completion rate vs number of questions new data, qualtrics data

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The takeaway here is that response rates vary widely depending on the channel you use to reach respondents. On the upper end, the Qualtrics blog reports that customers had 85% response rates for employee email NPS surveys and 33% for email NPS surveys.

A good response rate, the blog writes, “ranges between 5% and 30%. An excellent response rate is 50% or higher.”

This echoes reports from Customer Thermometer, which marks a response rate of 50% or higher as excellent. Response rates between 5%-30% are much more typical, the report notes. High response rates are driven by a strong motivation to complete the survey or a personal relationship between the brand and the customer.

If your business does little person-to-person contact, you’re out of luck. Customer Thermometer says you should expect responses on the lower end of the scale. The same goes for surveys distributed from unknown senders, which typically yield the lowest level of responses.

According to SurveyMonkey, surveys where the sender has no prior relationship have response rates of 20% to 30% on the high end.

Whatever numbers you do get, keep making those efforts to bring response rates up. That way, you have a better chance of increasing your survey completion rate. How, you ask?

Tips to Increase Survey Completion

If you want to boost survey completions among your customers, try the following tips.

1. Keep your survey brief.

We shouldn’t cram lots of questions into one survey, even if it’s tempting. Sure, it’d be nice to have more data points, but random people will probably not hunker down for 100 questions when we catch them during their half-hour lunch break.

Keep it short. Pare it down in any way you can.

Survey completion rate versus number of questions is a correlative relationship — the more questions you ask, the fewer people will answer them all. If you have the budget to pay the respondents, it’s a different story — to a degree.

“If you’re paying for survey responses, you’re more likely to get completions of a decently-sized survey. You’ll just want to avoid survey lengths that might tire, confuse, or frustrate the user. You’ll want to aim for quality over quantity,” says Pamela Bump, Head of Content Growth at HubSpot.

2. Give your customers an incentive.

For instance, if they’re cats, you could give them a glass of water with a fish inside.

Offer incentives that make sense for your target audience. If they feel like they are being rewarded for giving their time, they will have more motivation to complete the survey.

This can even accomplish two things at once — if you offer promo codes, discounts on products, or free shipping, it encourages them to shop with you again.

3. Keep it smooth and easy.

Keep your survey easy to read. Simplifying your questions has at least two benefits: People will understand the question better and give you the information you need, and people won’t get confused or frustrated and just leave the survey.

4. Know your customers and how to meet them where they are.

Here’s an anecdote about understanding your customers and learning how best to meet them where they are.

Early on in her role, Pamela Bump, HubSpot’s Head of Content Growth, conducted a survey of HubSpot Blog readers to learn more about their expertise levels, interests, challenges, and opportunities. Once published, she shared the survey with the blog’s email subscribers and a top reader list she had developed, aiming to receive 150+ responses.

“When the 20-question survey was getting a low response rate, I realized that blog readers were on the blog to read — not to give feedback. I removed questions that wouldn’t serve actionable insights. When I reshared a shorter, 10-question survey, it passed 200 responses in one week,” Bump shares.

Tip 5. Gamify your survey.

Make it fun! Brands have started turning surveys into eye candy with entertaining interfaces so they’re enjoyable to interact with.

Your respondents could unlock micro incentives as they answer more questions. You can word your questions in a fun and exciting way so it feels more like a BuzzFeed quiz. Someone saw the opportunity to make surveys into entertainment, and your imagination — well, and your budget — is the limit!

Your Turn to Boost Survey Completion Rates

Now, it’s time to start surveying. Remember to keep your user at the heart of the experience. Value your respondents’ time, and they’re more likely to give you compelling information. Creating short, fun-to-take surveys can also boost your completion rates.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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